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Now that you’ve decided to take control of your metabolism and have adjusted your calories to maintenance levels, you want to maintain this level of calories for at least two weeks. Then once things are humming along again, you can return to a caloric deficit. Might you gain some weight at maintenance? Maybe, but some will surely be water, muscle glycogen, etc. Basically nothing to worry about – easy come, easy go. Again, long term versus short term thinking. You need to correct the problem before you can move past it. Two weeks at maintenance will make further fat loss much more likely when you return to your caloric deficit. Chances are you’ll start feeling a lot better though, and you’ll have some great workouts.

There are many great, yet underused fat-loss strategies out there. Planned periods at maintenance eating can be found near the top of that list. Remember, the purpose of the two weeks at maintenance calories isn’t to maintain; it’s to make the subsequent calorie deficit more effective at fat loss. Think of it as a ‘resetting of the system’. Then you hit your deficit again and presto, more fat loss.

With a slow metabolism you can generally assume somewhere in the neighbourhood of 14x bodyweight is going to approximate maintenance calories. It might even be a bit lower depending on how severe your caloric deficit has been and for how long, but keep in mind that metabolism is only going to slow so much. It doesn’t shut off. These maintenance numbers are an approximation, but so are the more complicated equations that can be used to determine caloric requirements.

After the two weeks at maintenance are up, you return to your caloric deficit. However, this time take a moderate approach and shoot for approximately 12x bodyweight in calories. If you’re female and a bit lighter in bodyweight to begin with, you might need to start lower in order to create a sufficient fat-burning caloric deficit. Stay there for a couple weeks, assess your progress, and make adjustments as needed. If you’re getting leaner and your measurements have decreased, stay there. If you’re not, try decreasing calories by another 10% and reassess again two weeks later.

Remember, these caloric recommendations are just approximations; they’re starting points. Everyone is a bit different, so the key to long term success is being able to trouble shoot your program. A quick closing note on that very topic. If what you’re doing isn’t working, doing it longer isn’t going to make it suddenly start working. If it’s broken, fix it. If your program is not netting you any fat loss, you need to make some adjustments to your program. Don’t keep spinning your wheels doing something that is no longer working for you. Getting the results you’re after? Stay the course. Not getting the results you’re after? Make changes.

There is no reason to continually suffer the effects poor prior fat-loss efforts have had on your metabolism. There is no reason you should have to suffer a permanent sentence of stalled fat loss. Planned periods at maintenance calories are the key. However, there’s more to this strategy than simply repairing a slow metabolism. They can and should be used periodically throughout your fat-loss phase to promote continue fat loss. A periodic resetting of the system will go a long way to maintaining healthy metabolism and and continued fat loss.

Do you find that no matter what diet you try or how much exercise you do, you just can’t seem to lose fat anymore? Were you once pleased with your fat-loss progress, but now find yourself staring this big, ugly plateau in the face?

Nothing seems to work for you anymore and you’ve tried it all - high carbs, low carbs, fat burners, low calories, session after session of mind-numbing cardio. That flab isn’t going anywhere.

Frustrating, isn’t it? It’s like a brick wall standing in your way.

Your problem may be a damaged metabolism–a very real phenomenon - caused by prolonged dieting. I know that may sound scary, but it’s not as bad as some people make it out to be. With all the extremely low-calorie eating and hours of cardio that some people do day in and day out, it’s actually very commonplace. Rest assured, you’re not alone.

And I’ve got some good news for you. There’s a pretty simple way to repair your sluggish metabolism. Contrary to popular–albeit ill-informed–opinion, metabolic “damage” is not permanent and metabolism does not shut off. Yes, it can slow down, but this is actually a normal and expected response when you’re eating sub-maintenance calories.

There is a physiologically-based adaptive response that the body undergoes when eating in a caloric deficit. The hormones that govern metabolic rate and fat loss respond in a way that serves to preserve bodyfat. And the effect is magnified the leaner you get (which is often associated with the longer you’re trying to lose fat). End result? Slower, if not altogether stalled, fat loss. No matter how good your nutritional program, if you’re eating in a caloric deficit, your metabolism will attempt to adjust accordingly.

Ok, enough of the whys. How do we get that metabolism humming again? First off, you need to lose the short term thinking and adopt a longer term mindset. This is critical.

Even though this might go against ‘common wisdom’, you’re going to have to eat more, at least for a little while. Yes, you read that right – eat more, not less. You might find it hard to wrap your head around this concept, but trust me, it’s necessary. However, just ramping right up to an appropriate caloric intake isn’t necessarily the right approach for everyone. There is more than one way to approach the repair but I’d suggest you do it in steps - systematic and regular increases. This has the benefit of one, allowing you to gradually get used to eating more food, two, potentially preventing some fat regain, and three, maybe even causing some fat loss. So one approach is to determine how much you’re eating on an average day and then take your present intake and just add 10-20% to it every few days until you hit maintenance calories.

Putting It All Together

The take home message here is not that there is no place for steady state cardio, or that you should only be doing interval training. The best course of action is to use both forms of cardio. An overemphasis on either will result in less than optimal results. If you’re just starting out, I’d caution you from jumping right into an intense interval training workout. Rather, you should spend some time building up a baseline of cardiovascular fitness with steady state cardio. From that point you can start to do some lower intensity intervals. For example, you might walk on the treadmill at 3.0mph for your active recovery and power walk at 4.0mph for your sprints. With time and as your conditioning improves you can gradually up the intensity of your sprints.

As for intermediate and advanced trainees, the only real difference is in their level of cardiovascular conditioning. Intervals are all about perceived effort and as such what is intense to one may not be intense to another. Start out with 30-60″ on time at an RPE of about 7-8; not full out but much higher intensity than steady state.

Beginners
Traditional steady state cardio gradually moving into low intensity interval training

Intermediate
20s on / 60s off x 8-10 repeats
30s on / 90s off x 6-8 repeats
60s on / 180s off x 3-4 repeats

Advanced
30s on / 60s off x 8-10 repeats
60s on / 120s off x 5-6 repeats
60s on / 60s off x 6-8 repeats
90s on / 90s off x 4-5 repeats

SideBar – Intervals and Contest Prep

Interval training is well established as a time-efficient and very effective means of fat loss and this is also true for competitive bodybuilders and figure competitors. Steady state cardio, and lots of it, has been the Holy Grail of contest prep for years. However, there really is no good reason to have to resort to 10-14 hours or more of cardio per week to get in shape. So, can competitors use interval training in their contest prep? Yes, most definitely. However, they should do so while keeping certain things in mind.

One, a competitor of any significant size (ie. big male bodybuilders) should probably not be running, or running much. They should opt for non-impact cardio modalities like the stationary bike. Two, they need to keep in mind that interval training, similar to intense weight training, is a very CNS (Central Nervous System) intensive form of exercise. Short sprint intervals (~ 20s) are more CNS intensive than longer sprint intervals and as such you want to be mindful of how you balance that out with your lower body training. A few key points to consider:

1.Think of interval training as a lower-body workout and as such, be sure to be mindful of just how much lower-body training (volume) you’re doing. Too many interval workouts and too many lower-body workouts is a recipe for muscle and strength loss.

2.Put your interval-training workouts on your heavy lower body days. Why? So that your legs have more complete rest days per week. Doing them on your ‘Off’ or ‘Upper Body’ days gives your legs less recovery time and you run the risk of localized overtraining of your legs.

3.As your bodyfat approaches very lean levels recovery is at a premium. Consider less intensive forms of cardio – longer duration intervals (which by nature are less intense and therefore not as hard on the CNS), more steady state cardio, etc.

Efficiency sure sounds good, but when we’re trying to lose fat, we want to be inefficient fat burners. Look at a lot of physique competitors – they start off with 30 minutes of cardio three to four times a week and by the time they’re done dieting, they’re up to 60 minutes twice a day and even more in some cases. Did the 30 minutes four times per week stop producing results? Did they become more efficient?

But what about the often heralded fat-burning zone? I’m afraid to say that the fat-burning zone is completely overrated. Did you know that as you sit here reading this article, you are in the fat-burning zone? Do you think you’re burning lots of fat and getting ripped? The whole idea behind the fat-burning zone is that you use a greater proportion of fat as a fuel source with lower intensity work. As exercise intensity climbs, there’s a decreasing reliance on fat and an increasing reliance on stored carbohydrate in the form of glycogen to fuel activity. However, research supports the fact that the predominant fuel source used during exercise is not what is important for fat loss. Total daily energy expenditure is more important for fat loss than the major fuel used during exercise. So whether you burn fat or carbohydrate during your exercise session is not what determines your results; it’s how many calories you burned. So basically the strikes against slow cardio would be that it’s mind-numbingly boring, it’s time consuming, for a given quantity it produces less results over time, and the fat-burning zone, which is the major ’support’ for steady state cardio, is overrated and irrelevant.

Intervals and other forms of anaerobically-intense training (weight lifting) tax the metabolic structures of the body in a way that increases overall calorie usage as well as specific use of fat for fuel over time. There have been a number of studies that have demonstrated the superiority of interval training for fat loss, despite burning fewer calories during the actual activity. In one of the landmark interval training studies, two groups were compared to one another. In this study subjects engaged in either an endurance program (4-5 times per week for 30-45 minutes) for 20 weeks or an interval training program for 15 weeks. Neither group was placed on a diet. The estimated calories burned in the endurance group was more than double that of the interval training group. However, after statistical analysis it was shown that the interval training group experienced nine times the fat loss of the endurance group. How is this possible?

While one may burn less overall calories and less fat during an interval training workout, compared to steady state cardio, when the post-exercise recovery period is factored in, interval training leads to significantly greater energy expenditure and fat loss. This is due to the effects interval training has on your metabolism. Metabolic rate is not only elevated the workout, but also for hours after the workout, and this is the magic of interval training – the fat burned in the post-workout recovery period. There are numerous other studies that support the obvious efficacy of interval training seen in the previously mentioned study. And in contrast, there are multiple studies that show that with no change in diet, the inclusion of multiple hours of slow cardio resulted in no weight loss. Think of it this way, you could drag out your trip to the gym by taking the scenic route and turning a 10-minute drive into a 45-minute drive if you really wanted to. Sure, the end result would be the same since you arrived at the gym. But you could have gotten there faster by taking a more efficient route.

I thought I’d post an article that i recently wrote for a print magazine on intervals and fat loss. I’ll just post the first third of the article today and then will update with the other two thirds in subsequent blog posts.

What’s the first thing most people think of when they think of fat loss? Cardio. Yep, hour upon hour of boring, mind-numbing cardio. Why? Because that is what has been ingrained in our heads. You want to lose fat? Time for lots of cardio. Here’s the problem – there’s a reason you have to do so much of it; traditional cardio, or rather, aerobic exercise, doesn’t burn many calories to begin with. But the elliptical says you burned 1000 calories in 10 minutes? Sorry, not true. All of these machines overestimate caloric expenditure. There are numerous shortcomings that come with focusing your fat-loss efforts on session after session of steady state cardio, but we’ll come back to that. First, we’re going to look at a far more effective, time-efficient, albeit more intense, approach to fat-loss cardio.

Most people have at least heard of interval training by now. If you haven’t it simply refers to a form of ‘cardio’ where you repeatedly alternate periods of high-intensity effort with periods of lower-intensity effort. Interval training is normally defined by a work-to-rest ratio in which the ‘work’ component represents the high intensity/sprint component and the ‘rest’ component represents the low intensity/active recovery component. For example, repeatedly alternating a 30-second sprint with a 90-second brisk walk would be an example of interval training with a 1:3 work-to-rest ratio (the rest is 3x times longer than the work). Generally speaking, the specific details of how you set up an interval program are not that important. As long as you work hard, then rest, the specifics are not critical to your success. That said however, to give some more concrete guidelines for fat loss, a 30-90 second high intensity segment and anywhere from a 1:1 or 1:3 work-to-rest-ratio (so 30 seconds on/60 seconds off up to 90 seconds on/90 seconds off) is probably going to be your best bet more often than not. Of course there are times when you can do shorter and longer intervals as well.

Ok so we now know what interval training is, but the big question is, is it really superior to traditional steady state cardio when it comes to fat loss? What about the fact that everyone in the gym seems to do steady state cardio? Well, look around. How many people do you see slaving on the elliptical for an hour every time you’re in the gym … and yet they never look any different. Pretty common observation isn’t it? Here’s the problem with an over reliance on steady state cardio for fat loss. Besides the fact that it’s boring and time consuming, one of the biggest problems is that the more you do, the more you have to do. As you become more aerobically fit, you’ll become a more efficient fat burner. Sounds good doesn’t it? How much fuel does a fuel-efficient car burn? Not much. It gets a lot of output (mileage) for little input (fuel). Same with us. The more efficient we become, whether aerobically or biomechanically, the less energy our bodies have to expend for a given amount of activity.

More tomorrow …